All right, And joining us now is doctor Richard Restak, MD, and he is a neuroscientist as well, and he has written a lot of books on the brain, and now this is one kind of the nexus of our brain and artificial intelligence. So I wanted to get him on because we, as you know, we talk about AI and its impact on society quite a bit. Thank you for joining us, doctor Rustick.
Well, I'm happy to be here.
Thank you.
David.
You've written so many books and best selling author and of course people can bind this on Amazon. You've written so many books. What is different about the brain? What is different about this one? And why did you write this book?
I wrote this book to announce and to discuss the dangers that are lurking and so to speak, in the twenty first century and are unique to the going first, that are having an effect on the brain and a negative one, so that we really are imperiled by eight different factors, one of which is the global warming. We have new diseases that are present in the twenty first century that are increasing, starting with COVID and moving forward. We have problems of course with the global warming, which
we'll talk about more detail. And then the internet the effect of the Internet, the effect of AI memory, the alteration, the attempt to alter memory, almost to alter our memories of what the past is like. This is an ongoing enterprise by various governments of the world, including our own. We also have surveillance. The seventh a surveillance becoming increasingly a surveillance society. It's almost impossible to not be revealing
things about yourself because there's surveillance cameras everywhere. I can give you several examples, not just in my own personal life. And then finally, the eighth one is anxiety. All of these things are creating what I call existential anxiety. People are being given information, but it's being molded according to the thoughts and the inclinations of people in power. For instance,
let's take today's right out of New York Times. On page A seven, there's an article called the air in New Delhi is life threatening, and it tells the tale of the New York Times reporters who have spread themselves throughout New Delhi from six a m. Until late in the evening of a certain day recently, and they measured the particulate matter in the air, and it was anywhere from ten times to thirty times as great as would
be concerned minimally normal. Now on top of that you have the statement that they state that the government is actually trying to hide this kind of insight to the populace by spraying water and other things like that. It says that they're doing this around the measuring stations. They're also losing data from measuring stations during the worst outs pollution. So there you have the molding of the facts, either denying them all together or trying to improve them so
that people say, oh, well, they measured it down. It's such and such a measuring state, and it was really not a lot of high. Of course, they were spreading water and other things to try to reduce this. So we've got a capitalist society here in the United States which has invested interest in pushing forward certain scientific points of view. So science is being put sort of in
the back seat. And as politicians and other people, all of whom share one thing capitalistic enterprises in which they're part of, for which they are advancing.
And a kind of crony capitalism where they can get protection and subsidies as well, and the control is being taken away from us because as I was just reporting earlier today they're working very hard to make sure that state and local governments can't enact any control on artificial intelligence. And they came up in the context of talking about how the manufacturers of tasers also big manufacturers of police body camps, how they want to wed that to artificial intelligence.
And the question is, you know what could possibly go wrong with that? If they identify you, they misidentify you as a dangerous criminal, and warn the police about how dangerous you are, they could get people killed.
Well, not only that, but all these efforts set up a sense of anxiety and fear. Let me tell you what happened to me one morning, called a cab to go to medical appointment, and we've started going down the road. I said to the driver, you know you're not going the most efficient or the quickest way. He said, I know that, he said, but I don't want to go that way because they're speed cameras. I said, well, you know you're driving very sensibly and you're not speedy, and
I'm in no hurry. So what's the problem. He said, Well, they take pictures of everybody that goes by those cameras because they want to see who's in those photos in those cars. So I asked them to give me a reference for that, and he got set of didn't say anything else for the rest of the trip. So when I got down to the medical building, I got in the elevator and said, in this facility there is surveillance, both obvious and hidden, and the.
Third clause watch and you know this is one morning.
And then when I got up to sign in, I signed the board with an electronic ben and I didn't see you go, no signature I saw. I said, well it didn't take. You know it took, but we don't know it to go on the screen so it could be seen. I said, why is that? Said, well, somebody who haunts you might see the thing and then remember
it and use your for your signature to forward something somewhere. Well, first of all, there was a sign that said stand ten feet back, and secondly, there's nobody else behind me. So there's three examples, just drawing it random that were becoming an increasingly surveilled society, which is creating a sense of paranoia and a sense of fear. So the brain has to adjust to these type of things, David, and it's very hard to do.
And I think that is calculated. You know they've been they wanted to do this even to the extent and when you talk about these cameras taking everybody's picture, the flock network that is out there, this corporation that is saying, well, we can do whatever we want because it's in public space and you know we're we're not government, so we can collect this information. And yet they collect it in order to sell it to the government.
So it's just.
One level in direct but they not only grab your license plate, but they also do a complete profile of your car and all of its idiosyncrasies. Is have a dent here, does have a scrape there? What about a bumper sticker? So it creates a model of your car. And so they almost have like, you know, biometric identification of your cars as well as of you. And this is now made possible because of the advances of AI. But this has been something that has been concerning me.
I look at things kind of from a libertarian perspective, and this has been concerning me for a long time. The idea that government is using technology, many different ways of Internet, social media, things like that, to monitor and to manipulate us all the time, and to me, artificial intelligence just puts this on steroids. And so I think there's something to be anxious about. If we're going to
look at this, we should be concerned about it. Maybe not anxious, but we should be concerned about the goals of people who are putting this kind of stuff together.
So yeah, well there's that, and then there's if you can manage to change the present, you can manipulate the future. Of course. Is the real way to get it is to get control of the past. Is warwell pointed out? Yes, you control the past, you know, you can control the
present and by the implication, control of the future. And we're seeing alterations of materials, even government documents, government films, documentaries, things like that are being altered in ways that are not visible I should say detectable, not detectable to the ordinary person. So they get ideas about what the past
was like which are wrong and don't show you. As I mentioned in the book, if you were at a dance in eighteen fifty before the Civil War and it's a film or watch Let's say we're watching a film about eighteen fifty and we're seeing people ballroom dancing all that, and then one of them pulls the side and pulls out a cell phone, and you say, wait a minute,
we didn't have cell phones. Then, well, you know, there were a lot of things that were going on now that we're not going on in the past, and it's not too our advantage to try to pretend that they were. They weren't. We have to understand the past, understand the future, and we're not only creating situations that are false, but we're also like in nineteen eighty four, or Well created a character called Commander Olov. He was a war hero.
He got all sorts of metals, and it was all the products that were all told to honor him and so forth. Well, he never existed. He actually was made up entirely. And that's one of the things that the narrator is doing in the job of work is filling in photographs see concerting O WIV into historical events that happened, wartime scenarios, etc. Anyone reading it will say, wow, this is this is some man. Well, he was a complete fabrication. We're just about at that point with Sora out, the
the AI out. Well, it could take you and had you, you know, to say, let's get to David Knight and have him leading some sort of a parade or whatever, and you know, suddenly people say, well, gosh, I saw him with my own eyes. So what's happening is that the actually seeing is believing is being turned on its head. So that's no longer true.
You're talking about a completely fabricated character out of Orwell it's just recently they had Tilly Norwood, who has a completely fabricated AI personality, and the person who came up with it got agents representing her, They got her out there as an actress. I mean it was like, so, I've created an AI actress which will do a lot of different roles for you.
She probably does her own stunts as well.
I'm actually people in SAG, the screen actors Gil and they're furious about this.
And I said, any.
Agent that presents this AI character is not going to do any business with us. But we're already at that point. It truly is interesting, Yeah, And one of.
The ways of neutralizing it is to create the situation that exists right now between you and me. You're laughing, and I'm laughing because it seems funny, and it is funny, but it's a very serious purpose behind all of this. Yes, it's all hatter to try to alter people's perceptions so that they begin to doubt the varietity of what they're seeing.
That's right.
Yes, I've talked for the longest time about how the whole idea for the Internet was created by DARPA psychologists, and I've been concerned that it was all about the psychological manipulation from.
The get go with all of this.
But as a physician and as a neuroscientist, I'd be interested in your take on, you know, what is currently going on, because besides manipulating the past by changing information about the past or you know, memory holding it or writing a new alternative history of it, they are also concerned. And there's been projects that have been put out by DARPA, and I don't know if they've been successful or not, but they you know, they're putting out requests for people
to come up with things to manipulate people's memories. So you've got a soldier, they say it, who's got bad PTSD. Let's get rid of that memory. Let's give them different memories. What do you see in terms of someone who studies the brain and neuroscience, what do you see about that, what do you take, as I think is the state of the art with that.
Last book was called the Complete Book of Memory. It had to do with memory and studying memory in great detail. And of course you have to do away with the concept that memory is like a videotape or something that you just store in your brain and when you get and want to get it, you just bring it out like you bring out a videotape. It's not like that.
It's a reconstruction. Each time you think back to a certain event, you alter that memory so that you have memory one, memory two, memory three, on and on and all. That's the nature of memory. And memory can be manipulated. It's always, you know, in the courtroom they're always trying to avoid the contamination of the witness. An example that would be, well, which car went through the red light? And to ask a witness and he said, oh, it
was it was a red car went through the red light. Well, would it surprise you to know that it wasn't a red light but it was a stop sign? Misterial witness. Of course, his credibility is gone because he took the suggestion that it was a red light. Instead, it'll be very easy to do because you don't necessarily have that image of that intersection in your mind. So that's why there's protections even in the courtroom against leading the witness.
They caught, in other words, providing information that's either not through at all or half true. So we've got that call. This is not this didn't start in the twenty first century. That that started, you know, as long as we've had courtrooms. This is a more emphasis now on altering memory. So the people will not will get up there and undercross examination they'll do pretty well because their whole memory has been altered. They've changed by various mechanisms, suggestion, repeating information
which is false, of course, which is the misinformation. There's a cartoon about a week ago by Ramirez in which he's Fulter Prize winner. He has three doctors in an operating room in a laboratory. So one of them is looking into a microscope and he looks up and he says, this is the most dangerous pathogen we have ever encountered. And the second doctor says, well, is it bubonic plague? Is it smallpox? And then the one that he says, no, it's misinformation, disinformation.
That's right, And we've got to be very careful because many times the people who will tell us about that are the people who want to be the ones who define what the information is for us, and they will ask those leading questions, you know, when we're talking about
leading questions and manipulating people. There's been a lot of reports about artificial intelligence kind of people who have a particular psychosis or something and they get involved with the AI and it starts to confirm the thing that they want, because that's what it is set up to do in terms of bias that want to you know, be empathetic and sympathetic to people, and so it starts doing that and leading them further and further down a particular rabbit hole.
There's been situations of you know, people who got into severe mental distress, some suicides of some young children and other things like that speak to that aspect of it and the real danger of that. That is really kind of I think speaks to the psychological aspect and potential of artificial intelligence, and that could be weaponized. Right now, it's just kind of happening out of their business model, right, but that could definitely be weaponized against people.
Well, I talk about that. In my book, in the chapter on the Internet, there are famous examples of people who have suicided right on the internet law feed, and they've been manipulated to doing that by other people who have encourage them, said this would be a sign of strength, this would be a sign of that you're not afraid to die if necessary. And there's cases of it that actually led to the suicide. One of them is most grizzly.
I have in my book about a person who has talked into pouring gasoline over themselves and setting a match, all on open feed Internet. And while this fire is burning, you can hear everybody in the backgrounds cheering, we did it, We did it. We got him to do it.
Wow, that's amazing.
So there's something about the internet and about that actually brings out statistic criminal, psychopathic trends, and we don't know why. Is it. The fact that you don't necessarily can't be identified. It's something that is going to be influencing and has influenced the Internet greatly, and it will continue to do so until we understand it.
I think that's one things that's so dangerous about the things that we saw with lockdown. Other aspects of it. There's an adimization here in so many different ways. The government, tech and tech companies are trying to make sure that we don't we're not in person with each other. You know, many cases like, for example, in this interview, we couldn't do this interview if we both had if one of both of us had to travel. We're able to do this because we can do it over zoom or whatever.
But just taking ordinary things that you would normally do in terms of interacting with people in school or in church or in your community or whatever, taking that away and putting a screen between the two of you, it really does change the way people interact with each other. I remember Errol Morris, the film director, was able to get people to say all kinds of things.
He got a.
Murderer to confess, he got he got Robert McNamara to confess about the false Flago, the Vietnam War. He got people say all kinds of stuff because there was that distance between him and them. He could have interviewed them in person. But what he did was he put an enterotron,
which he is what he called it. It was basically a teleprompter that he had set up so he could do two way communication at the time, and once he had that distance there, then it completely changed the dynamics that he would have versus with somebody person to person. And that's what we're talking about here, isn't it.
Yeah, we're talking about that, And of course there's the inegradations of this, and it continues like we're you're interviewing me, we're discussing. I feel like it's a discussion. If I were to say something that later I regretted, I could probably say, oh, well, that wasn't me, that was my avatar.
Or my agent.
Right, I got an AI agent that's out there doing that, right,
that's crazy. We also see though, as a doctor, you're seeing people have noticed actual physical changes that can be observed in people's brains from I'm thinking the story about the London taxi drivers who would do the knowledge and they would find that as they memorized all these factual details and drew on that all the time in order to take people to you know, this very complicated city with its complicated streets, that they had a particular part
of their brain that was larger than the typical person. And then they found that once they stopped doing that, it started to shrink again, and we're starting to see that happening with people in a lot of different areas of their life, that kind of atrophy, and it's physically observable, isn't it.
Well, it is.
You have to learn.
You have to use the things that you have learned to do. Like I mentioned in my memory book, there's all kinds of memory exercises that you could do. I do them every day and they're very easy and they can help you to continue with your with your memory to keep it sharp.
Give us some examples. I'm sure everybody would love to know that. I would all like to have a better memory. What kind of things do we can we do to exercise Well.
Think about the fact that you never had to learn pictures when you were an infant and a young child. A picture was something that you could you may not know what you're looking at, but you could see it without an intermediary whrest. Language is something that you have to hear from other people. It's something that's sort of added on to the brain. Okay, So as a result, the most the best way of remembering something is to make a image for it.
Okay.
For instance, I have a little dog called a skipper Key. Skipper Key is a Belgian dog. He's a nice little fellow. But it was embarrassing to me when walking the street, people say what kind of a dog is that? And it couldn't come up with a name because it was such complicated. And I thought that skipper Key, I didn't speak any doubt you or anything. So then I got this image of a small boat with a large captain
with a beard holding a big key. So it was skipper Key, and I remember forever, so I was I had the picture. Once I have the picture, it's easy to do another way, easy way to do it, and you can do that with all kinds of times. All the time, I was going upstairs before I came down to the office, and I wanted to get my wallet and I wanted to get my cell phone. So I just had an image of a wallet in the form of a cell phone, and I was walking up the
stairs talking into the wallet cell phone. So I got up and I knew I had these two elements to get. Be very easy to get one and forget the other, so that you have these images all the time, and the quickest you know. This is sort of off the topic of the book, but if you want to have a firepower memory for a load of things, it's up to ten things and get ten areas that you are familiar with that every day, and then you could put
on those images the thing you're trying to remember. So if I'm trying to remember a loaf of bread, milk, maybe a batteries, I have a regular way of doing that. I have like I remember the library that's near my home, the coffee shop, liquor store, Georgetown University, Medical School where I went, Georgetown University, Cafe Milano, which is a place in Washington everybody gathers, and then Keybridge, Ewa, Jeema Memorial, and Regan Airport. So that bread would be, for instance,
the loaf of bread. I was looking in the window of the library. Instead of seeing books, I see bread, loaves of bread. And when I get down to the liquor store, instead of being filled with liquor, that'll be milk bottles. So that's how I love to get to it. So I have those ten so I can get ten items together not any problems at all.
That's great.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting you talk about the importance of a visualization. It's one of the things that I do in terms of preparing for the show. I have a lot of articles that I go through and it's really when I highlight things or when I write them down, that's when I can remember them. If I don't do that, if I were just to read these things, I wouldn't remember them. But if I interact with it and write
it down, that helps me to remember it. So that is a kind of visualization there, I guess as well.
It is.
It truly is interesting what you said earlier about memory not being something that is stored in a place. As somebody coming from a computer science background, that was a very different thing. When you construct your your memory, you know, how do you reconstruct that? I mean that that as opens up a whole new area of questions as well. In other words, if every time somebody brings up a subject, I mean, there is isn't something that's stored initially to reference that and then rebuild from that.
There's that because there's the inner there's the interconnections. Like you know, somebody listening to us might say, well, gee, this is called the twenty first century brain, but I haven't heard that much about the brain. Well let me just link that up so that these things make sense. We have a new version, or I should say, a new understanding of the brain called the connectomic brain, in which there's all kinds of interactions in the brain of
parts of the brain. But you don't we're just learning about I have the I use the metaphor of a bull of spaghetti. You pull out one of the strains of spaghetti, and you're never have any idea what it's connected to. How many other strains is spaghetti this is connected to? So that if you think of the brain as being kind of set to make connections, that's its natural process. So it gets back to these things that we were talking about earlier, you know, global warming and
memory and surveillance and all that. How are we going to solve all those Well, somehow or other those things are connected with each other. That's the take home message of this book. And the basic goal is to try to figure out what it is that connects these things, what it is that would allow us to buy solving one of them solve the other. And I mentioned at the end of the book, experts so far haven't done it.
So it's useful, as Hiak said, to get ordinary people to give When I say ordinary, I mean, non specialized people to give their ideas. Do you I wonder what such and such would happen, what would happen about global warming for a while those In fact, there's still experiments going on on the effect of sulfur that would help the the CO two problem and you know, shooting sulfur
up into the into the atmosphere. Of course, the reason for that was the volcano in nineteen eighty something in which after that volcano in Hawaii it was noted that the air was clearer and there was less pollution. So that's something to think about, is there's some way of using that particular sulfur experiment to decrease global warming. War, for instance, we don't think of war as a cause of global warming, but it is.
Or CO two warning.
Yeah, but what up since the Ukraine War and the gauze of war. Then you know, a tremendous amount that's going to overcome and exceed the benefit of any of these things, like you know, non gasoline engines, but using things like that.
Yeah, it's kind of like you know, shooting up rockets in order to put satellites up. You know, how many, how many cars and lifetime use of cars from people would that be equivalent to and you start talking about all the missiles that are being shot and then you get to the explosives as well. Uh, it is really interesting how they focus us on their objectives for their ways to control the manipulation has been going on for quite some time. And so yeah, that is it is
pretty amazing. And I guess that's my you know, my my. When we look at this stuff, it really does look like science fiction. And I'm almost inclined to write it off on our first see it when DARPA is saying, well, we need to find some way that we can, uh, you know, erase memories and people and insert new memories into them. And we were going back to total recall, right, so it sounds like something from Philip K. Dick novel,
but they're really working on that. And I guess one of the most striking things that we saw we reported on a couple of weeks ago, and it was a company that was bragging about how they could read your mind more accurately and quickly than their competitors. Because there's a lot of different companies that are doing this and
how they could it's called brain. It was the name of the company, and so they had a way that they would do MRI and they could essentially train it on your brain in a much shorter period of time to the other people, and they could get much better results. And our producers just pull this up. So what they do is they show you an image and you're looking at that image, and then it's reading your mind and reconstructing what you're looking at, which I thought was absolutely
amazing and terrifying at the same time. How is this going to be used? I guess that's the real issue when we start talking about all these different things. I think that is the real case that it's difficult for people to understand just how far and how quickly the technology has progressed, and then to say, and how do we control this from being used for bad purposes?
Well, that's a specifically twenty first century problem, because all of these things have either originated in the twenty first century or they have in fact further developed and become increasingly threatening. And bear in mind, we have to have to solve these problems because they're not something that's going to go away. And then the most important thing to remember, David, is that all of these things harm the brain, and the brain is the thinking processor. It's going to save us.
It's going to figure out what the problems, what the solutions to the problems are. So we know now that wildfire smoke, for instance, it creates dementia, It enhances the likelihood of something that's coming to menash So as the brain is affected negatively increasingly over longer and longer periods of time, our ability to solve these problems and to decrease. So we've got to do it now. We've got to
get serious about it. And this business of people getting up saying the global warming is fiction and all that is really very very disturbing.
Yeah.
Well, you know the example that you gave earlier of the fact that the Indian government was manipulating the temperature at some of the stations there.
That kind of works both ways.
They have put some of these temperature stations on the airport tarmacs, and in the UK they have a lot of the temperature stations that they've got there. They're just extrapolating the data. They don't have real temperature measurement stations there. So it all really gets back, I think, to the scientific method, and that's really where we have to hold people's feet to the fire. We're talking about something like that.
We can have an absolute standard of what truth is, and that truth is going to be being able to measure something accurately and being able to reproduce that. And then I think a good yardstick for that is when somebody is trying to high their data. That's that's the clue right there that they're not doing science. Because if they're doing science and they've come to the right conclusion, they don't have a problem with somebody looking at their data.
And so I've got a question here for you from a person in the audience asking you know about doctors James Giordano and Charles Morgan and their work with military. I'm not familiar with those names. I don't know if you know anything about that or not.
To your Donna says familiar. What particular thing are they asking about them?
I don't know.
It just says their work with military. I guess i'd have to do with something, but you haven't heard of it.
I'm not sure I could say to your dollar, did this or did that? Not sure?
I understand.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the things that we have been anxious about and of course, as Christians, we have one answer to it. But you talk about how this is something that has been around pretty much all of our life. I mean there was I grew up with anxiety about nuclear warfare. Example, that was on everybody's television, and that was a fourth front front of our mind, especially growing up in Florida when the Cuban missile crisis was happening. They got us really afraid of that.
When I was in elementary school, you know, it's like there's not gonna be enough time for you to get home, you know, a nuclear bomb started falling in So I mean there's all these different ways that you can panic people. I guess part of it is how do we identify the real problems and how do we deal with those problems because there's always things that are competing for our attention and our anxiety, many of which are not real, you know, And usually the things that you're really the
most concerned about won't happen. And it may be sometimes because you have taken a precaution about it. What would you say about that about anxiety?
It started to break up a little bit. Can you hear me? Clearly?
I hear you yes, yes, sorry about that. You talked about.
Breaking up a little bit, talking.
About traumatizing a population. You know, what do you do to guard against that type of thing? And of course that's going to really escalate with the ability of AI to create a narrative.
Yeah, well, let's talk about it. There's an avenue to get into that. Let's go back to what you've brought about the atomic weapons and the atomic war, the fears of the people that there's going to be another atomic war.
I mean, you know, this is not unrealistic. There's even been a movie that's just come out that's getting all kinds of attention, as you know, and it has to do with the threat of a nuclear war things in the If you look at what's happening in the Europe right now, there's all kinds of suggestions that could lead
to a nuclear war. I mean, Ukraine now has announced that they're under no conditions willing to give up any land and Stalin is i mean Putin is thinking what he can do to change that, but maybe he'll attack another country. I mean, this is scary stuff. So what's happening in response to the government is to try to show that, oh we shouldn't worry about it. We have things under control. But I don't think things are under control.
And we've talked about the problems, and we talked about problems you have. Your final chapter is New Ways of Thinking, and i'd like to talk about that. One of the things that you say is Occam was wrong. Occam's razor that you know people are familiar with. Tell us a little bit about that. Why is I come wrong?
Well, because he says that, you know, the entities are not to be multiplied, meaning that we can always explain things best by limiting ourselves to the minimum amount of factors. Ideally want one cause of every effect. That's not true. It's certainly not true in the twenty first century. There's all kinds of interactions between factors and cause, so that Alkham was wrong in that basis. We have to think of an interconnecting pool, just as in the brain, of
interconnections of neurons, interconnections of these problems. And they're all related. They're all really, all eight of them I talk about in my book. They're all related. And if you can figure a way of influencing one, you influence all the others.
I mean, who would think there'd be a connection between global warming and the amount of artisan and cheese for INSS high end cheese, well there is because they don't chicken stole lay many eggs, and it would be all the various other things to come on in terms of making cheese. I've earned that. Learned that the other day. That was something that was a surprise to me.
You know, it's kind of interesting. We talked about Connections so much. There was a series that was I think it was on PBS. I think the guy's name was Burke. I can't remember his first name. I'm not sure about the last name.
But we had a.
Series called Connections, and I thought was fascinating because what he would do is he would take a whole series of connections to show how a particular technology had evolved, you know, so he might go from you know, the quill to the to the jet engine.
Or something like that.
And it was a fascinating, fascinating thread of things, very much like what you're talking about.
It really is. And I did I did consult his work, Actually did you. I was writing this book because he did that Connections. He did a book called The Day of the World Changed and all this he also did a book called Circles, in which he would start with one particular event that he cared in history, and if you go around the circle, you come back to the beginning where it started, where this particular inventor invented something would led up to it. What was the circle leading
to that? So, yes, we're talking about connections, and we're talking about the inability to understand things without reference to awarding and accessory factors. We have that going all the time, denying things that are going to be happy. Of course, I think the fearful thing is that the government is aiding in this denial, because if you deny that there's a problem, then there's very little impetus to try to solve it, you know, Yeah, and there no problem, don't try to solve it.
They're throwing out their own chaos and uncertainty and anxiety that's out there all the time always.
I guess.
So the question is you're talking about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. I mean it sounds like a government policy. I think they've got bureaucracies that specialized on that.
Yeah, yeah, well actually that's true.
Yeah, that's in your section there about new ways of thinking, and so how do we incorporate that in the new ways of thinking that help us to solve this riddle.
Well, each of those factors is a factor that helps you to understand things and to have more control. It doesn't necessarily mean it helps you to link them together. That has to be done by original thinking. You have to be under those things. Things are evolvable. You don't have a basic situation that doesn't change. It changes all the time. So that the other thing that I want to emphasize the most is that is the role of
capitalism in all of this. I mean, there's all this like the private equity, the business of people having a point of view that is going to advance them financially, and that blinding them to the problems that are here. Like,
for instance, we talked about global warming. Well, the rich people of very rich people are buying multi million dollar departments and condominiums which have special air filters which will keep wildfire smoke out and we'll try to keep the global warming effect at bay by superpower air conditioners.
So the building they're building their own bunkers to buildings that are creating all kinds of chaos and and uh, you know, weapons of war, mass destruction, they're out. They're building super bunkers in various places as well, So I think they're somewhat pessimistic about what they're doing.
Well, it's basically the idea is that, you know, we don't care about the ordinary person. We're going to survive. We're going to see to our own survival, and if we in order to do that we have to deny certain things that are that are going on, will do so. Now, incidentally, all of this is not conscious thinking. They don't necessarily say, well, I'm going to deny global warming because it will be to my advantage financially because all my investment is in
the globe the all gas industry. They don't. They don't do it that way. They come up with pseudo logic things that seem to make sense to them, but if they didn't have a financial thrust in the matter, they would look out upon it quite differently.
That's right.
We can always find a justification for what it was, what it is that we really want. Everybody should understand that if your parents this time of year, at Christmas time, you can always understand that people will come up with a justification for what they.
Want, and that's as.
True of government as it is of corporations out there, and it's really dangerous one of the two of them connect with each other. I think that's one of the things. You know, you talk about connections and the importance of it and how we can try to connect these different factors, each of us individually, But I think it's the human connection that is out there that is going to be essential for all of this. It's going to be our collective work on all this. What do you think about that?
Would you agree with that?
Well, I'd agree with it, But there's so many things that are taking place now that are causing the schisms and yes, splitting people into factors and belief systems and political points of view, and that's very dangerous because then you can't get together any kind of unity, even in the face of an emergency.
Well, I think we've always had I think we've always had these factor you know, factions and things like that. You know, the founders of the country warned about factions and political parties. But I think what makes it unique is that when you're interacting with people on a personal basis, you interact with them a little bit differently than if you've got that separation between you that technology is giving us now because now you're interacting with something that's abstracted,
is not with another person. And there's also the body language that you're not picking up on. But it makes it easier for you to be harder on people when there's that distance there. I think that's why I think, you know, the personal connection I think is really vital to making these connections and coming up with an understanding
of what's going on. We talked about the hidden factors that are out there, hidden unrelated to topics other people, as you pointed out earlier, just talking to ordinary people
about what is that you see with different things. I think that is the genius of the collective free market out there, that there's so many observers who are looking at things and thinking about them, and it's kind of their collective decision that is kind of guiding things along, as opposed to having a central planner who's doing that. What do you think about that You've got to in your final chapter a new way of thinking. You have
what you call it sensible solution. What does that really involve?
I'm sorry, I hear what you said.
You have a sensible solution. What do you think a sensible solution to the kind of stress and chaos and anxiety that we have, manipulation that we have. What is a solution to that?
Well? I think the Wikipedia is a good example of that. They have people from all walks of life, all levels of education, free to contribute to whatever topic they may want to do that it may be helpful. I mentioned earlier about the effect of global warming on the making of cheese. It might be somebody who makes cheese that's going to come up with some idea. You know, we don't know that. We don't know that. That may not be where it comes some original idea of want to
do about global warming? And you put it on what I'd like to think, And I hope it will be developed a kind of Wikipedia where the ordinary person can feel free to put forth their ideas about it. Now you say, well, we already have that, we have the Internet. No, we don't. The Internet is a commercial situation. It's all done for making money and grab attention and all that, and there's no criticism of it. There's no pure review,
if you will, rights in the Wikipedia. I mean, you know, people get write in and say, well, that particular contribution as bonkers and then give an example why it is that was a very good idea. And after that you begin to get things coming together in unpredictable ways that they help us solve these eight problems.
Yeah, the problem is it seems like whenever you wind up having a form or place where things can be, and that's true of the Internet, it's also true of Wikipedia, then it becomes you have gatekeepers who are there and we saw this in spades throughout the COVID stuff that if somebody's got a different idea, rather than debate them, the impetus is to silence them by the people who
are an authority. And so that really, I think is the key thing, and I think as part of that we see a continuing rise in disgust and deprivation of free speech. People are not interested in the principle of free speech. They don't want to have open debate. And I see this regardless of where people coming from on the political spectrum. There is a declining interest and debate
and thinking. You know, the debate is critical to critical thinking, and so the people who are in charge, the gatekeepers, whether it's Wikipedia or the Internet or any other form of information. They are weighing in on that, and they don't want things that they disagree with. And it might be because they've got an agenda, or it might be because they've just got a particular prejudice about something. They want to make sure that the contrary views don't get
out there. That I think is the real keys that's there. And again, this is part of this atomization that we have of people feeding that tribalism in the way that we've never seen it before using technology.
I would agree with everything you've just said exactly, and I think we have to try to get beyond that. But we get back again to this business of people having their own personal financial point of view and position and pushing that basically on the fact that they look upon it as so maybe we're talking about a capitalism problem. We've got capitalism. It's what this country's all about. But
I mean it's certain parts of it. Now we've gone to the point where people are unable to take another point of view if it's going to be financially harmful and hurtful to them.
Yeah, I think that, you know, we start looking at the tech companies.
I don't think that their capitalism would exist.
I don't think they have billions of dollars if they weren't unified with the government. So there's a there's a symbiosis there that the two of these entities feed off.
Of each other.
And I think that's that in exus, right there is the is the difficult thing. And and so I think, you know, when I think of capitalism, I don't like to refer to capitalism anymore because I think of it as a partnership, a public private partnership, some kind of an economic fascism where they are working together. But I like to think of a free, competitive market where the government doesn't have any role except as some kind of a referee between two parties that have a conflict or something.
But yeah, that's the thing that's really driving this. You know, many people when they talk about AI, they said, well, you know, here's a couple of different outcomes. Maybe this stuff really works the way it's supposed to work, it takes everybody's jobs and we wind up with a depression, or maybe it doesn't work at all, in which case the big AI stock bubble that we've got bursts and
everybody loses their job because of that. Well, there's a third alternative, and that is that the government keeps propping it up with public funds because it feeds their surveillance and manipulation needs their ability to surveil and to control us. And I really think that that's where this is all going to head. I don't really you know, those other two things may happen, and they may be true, but I think there is a customer out there for the AI stuff that is driving all this stuff that has
been putting out these proposals for the longest time. That's governments, governments around the world. I mean, we look at the Brain project that we had a few years ago, that was during the Boma administration. But things like the Brain Computer Interface that Elon Musk and many other tech companies are doing out there. There's neuralink and there's a lot
of them that are doing that. That's being driven by the government wanting to connect into our minds, hack into our minds really, and they've been funding that kind of thing. So how do we break that.
Yeah, on the Musk side, it sees doing it for money, I mean obviously to make money, that's right, So that there's unholy alliance, if you will, between someone who can't see anything on the dollar, and in the other side of the government can't see anything other than increasing power and surveillance over the population.
Yeah, that's right, absolutely true. Well, it's a fascinating book. It's fascinating take on this and and of course you've written many books on the brain, the memory one very interesting, and you do have sections about memory in this book as well. And people be able to find this on Amazon, I guess is the best place that they can find it looking for the title of this and it is.
You know, it is something that I think we all need to think about how we're going to operate the effects that this technology is having on our brains in the twenty first century. And that is the title of the book, The twenty first Century Brain by Richard Restak. Thank you very much, doctor Restak. Thank you, appreciate you coming on.
And Georgia, thank you.
A very interesting conversation. Thank you. Have a good day. Folks are gonna take a quick break and we will be right back.
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